Our Story

Our products reflect our perspective.

What are the active System planner notebooks?

The Archer Day Planner and the C2 Prototype Planner are a means of getting out of your head and out of your phone – noting that cluttered minds and a cramped phones are terrible places for you to keep track of daily appointments, thoughts, to-do’s and all the other loose-change scraps of information that define a day.

Our planner notebooks are places to work, to organize, to jot thoughts and ideas, to keep track of life as it passes by. They are part daily planner and part life journal. The design is intended to be grounding and relaxing, promoting the transfer of free-radical thoughts from an overly-active brain to therapeutic, always-on, endlessly utilitarian, ever lasting paper. Nothing feels more real.

Our beliefs drive our product development. Here's where we stand:

Life moves fast.

Too fast to remember. The Active System provides a vessel in which to log a day -- its activities, its people, its great revelations, its moments -- both large and small in detail. Together, a day past is a picture painted in an enduring way on each 2-page spread of the Action System.

Too many screens.

Offering a place to work, organize, denote and think freely in an off-screen package provides an active approach to life that’s not dependent on pixels, batteries, third-party integrations, small type, iCloud, Dropbox or anything else. And working in pen-and-paper brings its own particular pleasures and tactile delights.

One day, you will want to look back.

You may have to provide an alibi. Or, you may want to reflect on one aspect of your life -- eating or spending habits, for example. Or you may want to revisit the past to just generally reminisce. Instagram is great for that, in a sense, but with the Active System, you’re creating genuine life artifacts, ones that can live on a shelf and be referred to endlessly as future life dictates.

Creative productivity is important.

Creativity is fostered in some forms, hindered in others. Your phone is a terrible place to sketch, for example. The Active System offers a variety of opportunities for daily creativity and expression, which leads to you being a more creative person, both in general and in particular.

Life has become scattershot and endlessly distracting.

The Active System provides a means for rounding up the randomness and promoting focus.

The Inbox is universally hated.

Yet, that is where the big majority of us go to when it’s time to “work.” And a lot of the time, it’s just being reactive to other people’s emails, instead of focusing on the tasks and projects that are core and important to your mission. The Active System provides another place to work. Grab a coffee, your thoughts, The Active System and a park bench. Just see how much actual work you can get done.

The subconscious is amazing.

Endless reports speak of the power of the subconscious, going all the way back to “let me think about it” and “everything looks better after a good night’s sleep.” The Active System capitalizes on the amazing powers of the subconscious by priming that pump. When you start your day by copying all your appointments into the Active System, logging a few details of the day, jotting down a few to-do’s, you’re actively engaging the subconscious, forcing it to reckon with the day ahead. Don’t be surprised when good ideas start popping up out of nowhere.

Life needs structure, with flexibility.

Lots of us work better in some sort of structure, but are hindered by many of the poor structures that exist readily -- inboxes, meetings, iCal, Outlook, web forms. The Active System is a brand new structure created from scratch to fill just this void, to provide a structure like no other, with the end user providing both the charm and the flexibility. Use the parts of the structure that work for you, and feel free to make the rest your own. Don’t want to track weather? Then don’t -- use the weather box to track moon phases. Or bird sightings. Or sketches of people on the subway -- whatever you like. All of the boxes in The Active System come with an intended use and endless alternate uses.